We detail the implementation of RUBEN, a scalable emulator based on software routers which implements and evaluate energy-aware algorithms in backbone networks. Our solution adopts virtualization techniques to reproduce the behavior of an entire backbone network on a single machine.
Each virtual machine is a router implementing an energy-aware algorithm. Moreover, RUBEN is tailored to the measurements of transients behaviors, i.e., the increase in the RTT and in the packet loss as a consequence of routing instabilities occurring when the set of devices in sleep mode is reconfigured.